“At most media companies, it’s about the page views, the audience, the distribution strategy; and while we definitely think about those things, we really focus on the creators,” 25-year-old MacKenzie Barth told to me as she cradled a latte in her hands. Barth and I were hunkered down in a Manhattan coffee shop talking about her company’s dynamic rise from campus publication to global media network.

In 2012, Barth and her Northwestern roommate Sarah Adler launched Spoon University, a student-run publication that focused on food-related content for college-aged Millennials. In just a few years, the Northwestern-only publication has proliferated around the world. Between February and April of 2015, Spoon’s traffic catapulted from 200,000 unique visitors to 2 million. Today, Spoon garners around 4 million unique visitors each month, and there are 170 Spoon "chapters" around the world.

Four years ago, at the beginning of their junior year, Barth and Adler moved off campus and, for the first time, faced the responsibility of feeding themselves. Barth had to call her mother to ask for directions on how cook a chicken breast. How pink is too pink? “I felt like people prepare you for everything else in your life except for the moment where you have to become an adult,” she said to me with a slight roll of the eyes.

Barth and Adler assumed that many peers were in a similar rut, and channeling frustration into action the duo decided to leverage their media know-how (garnered during internships at pubs like Lucky, Wired and Sports Illustrated)to launch Spoon University.

“By senior year we had a group of 100 students who were writing, editing, doing photo, video, marketing, ad sales,” Barth recalls. “We were publishing a quarterly print magazine and built a website where people were publishing content.”

Eventually, Adler and Barth began to receive emails from others interested in starting something similar on their own campuses. Soon, chapters of Spoon were up and running at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, Penn State University, University of Chicago, New York University, and the University of Illinois.

Spoon University Homepage

“It was around the time that food was becoming a much bigger conversation at college,” Barth says. Plus, she and Adler recognized a need among their peers “to be entrepreneurial and leave a legacy.” Barth and Adler noted that students wanted to “create things” that they could have their own personal imprint on, that they felt were impacting others in a positive way, and that would remain even after they’d graduated and moved on.

This recognition has remained a touchstone of Spoon’s methodology and success.

“We’re big into intrinsic motivation,” Barth explains. “There’s a book I like by Daniel Pink calledDrive. You have to have mastery, autonomy and purpose to create intrinsic motivation. And if people are intrinsically motivated, they create more work, better work, more creative work.”

“Mastery is mastery of skills, feeling like you’re getting better, making progress,” says Barth. “Any time a student joins the network, they go through training. They learn about SEO, headline writing, food photography, social media strategy—everything you’d need to know in digital media. And then we give them the platform to be published and we give them the analytics. They can use that to apply for jobs and internships and also improve their writing over time.”

The membership fee makes the Spoon University writers “still very much our customers and not our employees,” says Barth. “And so everything that we do is to improve their experience.” Editors work with the students and provide feedback. “It’s essentially like having an editor/mentor throughout college,” she says. “We’re super into the idea of trying to figure out better ways to help our members grow and learn.”

To facilitate autonomy, Spoon puts the power in the hands of the creators. “Autonomy is being able to write what you want, throw whatever event that you want; having the freedom to choose your voice and have that be heard. There is no Spoon voice. Each person can craft their own.”

As for purpose, “a lot of people are motivated by the community aspect of it,” says Barth, “being a part of not only your tight-knit editorial community that you meet with every week, but also to something a lot bigger: helping a generation eat a little more intelligently, providing something that’s shifting the conversation in a much bigger way that goes beyond the one article you may be writing that day.” They furtherfacilitate community building with Facebook groups, a Slack channel, and an annual conference every year where writers from around the country can meet in person.

“A lot of the time people don’t know what they want and need so you have to make decisions for them,” notes Barth. A big part of Spoon’s success has been their focus on what people want, even if they can’t express it. And it seems that Barth and Adler’s ability to read between the lines will keep them writing their own success story for a long time to come.

Research assistance by Kirby Barth

I am the author of "A Taste of Generation Yum: How the Millennial Generation's Love for Organic Fare, Celebrity Chefs and Microbrews Will Make or Break the Future of Food." Today, I utilize my years of empirical research to advise Fortune 500 companies, start-ups and indepen...